Nick Szabo  🔑

Hereford cattle, bred in the West Midlands, the hay hinterland of the earliest industrializing region in the world. The _bos taurus_ type of cattle, unique to Europe until the European diaspora, gave more beef & milk & facilitated making hard cheese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereford_cattle … /3pic.twitter.com/qXkTWfXFjM

A key benefit of grain agriculture: it's storable & transportable. Hard cheese & sausage gave stationary pastoralism portable protein. Here is Cheshire hard cheese, once a staple of the Royal Navy & also from the hay hinterlands of the Midlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_cheese … /4pic.twitter.com/JSDzmocegR

The seeds of stationary pastoralism were sown millennia before when northern Europeans evolved a form of lactase persistence, alongside their _bos taurus_ cows evolving new milk proteins: See https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/lactase-persistence-and-quasi.html … /5pic.twitter.com/RCnzYcTMLs

Found some more data related to lactose intolerance and dairy consumption. The prevalence of lactose intolerance especially in the Dutch population is staggeringly low. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586535/ …pic.twitter.com/coXSyySRTl